How to build a loyal customer base selling beauty products online

Beauty is one of the industries with the lowest customer loyalty. With so many choices and awareness, conscious consumerism has encompassed even higher standards around skin health and sustainability.

While consumers defining their own approach to beauty is nothing new, but (COVID-19) has furthermore accelerated this trend and it has become crucial for organizations to keep up with the consumers.

Building a rapport with customers is challenging. So when it comes to building a relationship with consumers through modern devices, it can prove to be even more difficult. It’s important for brands to consistently engage with consumers to keep them active and find ways to build loyalty to your beauty brand.

Now the question is how to build a loyal customer base selling beauty products online?

1. Create a Brand Identity

2. Never Ignore Feedback and Review

3. Incentivize Your Customers to Leave Reviews with Rewards

4. Ensure a Social Media Presence

5. Collaborate with MUAs, Influencers, and Beauty Professionals

6. Create a High-Quality E-commerce Website

7. Ask to Showcase Customer Reviews and Testimonials

8. Make Use of Reporting and Analytics Tools

9. Take Your Customer Service to the Next Level – By Harnessing the benefits of a CRM Software

 

Loyal customers are what build a successful e-commerce business. Let’s look at some of the top actionable strategies for customer retention in the e-commerce business.

 

1. Create a Brand Identity 

1.1 Introduce WHO YOU ARE?

The first step is to establish a strong brand identity that is appealing and caters to the target audience.

When a customer connects with your story, purpose, and brand values, it increases the likelihood of them doing business with you again. This can help you jumpstart or strengthen your brand community and increase the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

 

1.2 Induce a Sense of Belonging

They say Belonging is the New Customer Support.

Beauty communities can become an essential part of a customer’s consumer identity at the core because the beauty industry is there to make you feel good. It can ultimately strengthen their connection and customer loyalty to your brand.

You can provide a platform for customers that makes it easy to express themselves meaningfully and engage with each other.

For instance, LEGO Life, a social media app for children under 13, lets users share their handiwork and comment on each other’s creations. With over 10 million members, the online community provides an organic way to enhance brand awareness by allowing younger audiences to participate through a social network.(Source: Forbes)

You can always find creative ways to engage your beauty community so they maintain a personal desire to see the success of your brand!

 

2. Never Ignore Feedback and Review

Building loyalty is more than ensuring that your customers “like” you.

At the end of the day, customer retention is about trust. Customers need to know that the products are reliable, which is how trust is built, and ​​transparency is a crucial factor for winning the trust of your audience.

Additionally, negative reviews will always help your customers, set realistic expectations, and prevent new customers from being disappointed. Some bad reviews may not be about the product quality specifications, but about other factors – such as size or material.

Seeing these details can help new shoppers understand what to expect, and make informed purchase decisions. The average online consumer spends 13 minutes and 45 seconds reading a review before making a decision.

 

3. Incentivize your Customers to Leave Reviews with Rewards

3.1 Personalize your offerings

Give a personalized experience to increase consumer connection to your brand and diversify the ways you reward your customers. Tracking which rewards are running more successfully can allow better results and keep your customer base engaged, excited, and connected to your beauty brand.

 

3.2 Give out product samples

Ideally, samples or free gifts of your beauty product with purchase also help them gain a first-hand experience of your products.

Understanding your customers helps you shape your brand to be successful by predicting trends, getting familiar with purchase patterns, and understanding which of your products are gaining the most traction.

To better understand your customer one should properly utilize the insights gained from rewards programs. You can easily view all interactions with your rewards program and then alter according to the information you gain.

 

4. Ensure a Social Media Presence 

Create a communication consortium on every social media platform possible and meet your customers wherever they are. Address appreciation, complaints, and feedback in real-time.

Further, let customers know about new product announcements, upgrades, and launches over these platforms and even use influencers!

A recent study has shown that around 40% of consumers discover new brands or products via social media and people, regardless of gender, invest in high-quality beauty products.

 

5. Collaborate with MUAs, Influencers & Beauty Professionals

Pursuing meaningful relations with these experts can help boost the credibility of your products. They can give concrete feedback on what is working well, what could work well, and other important insights.

And influencers can explore and increase your beauty brand’s visibility through their massive followership, and eventually encourage sales.

 

6. Create a High-Quality Ecommerce Website

Getting closer to your potential customers in the cosmetic business requires investing in a high-quality e-commerce website.

It should be geared towards helping your target audience make purchases online with an additional focus on design, content, navigation, and the overall vibe of your eCommerce website.

Therefore it is essential to hire the right people to develop your online presence via the website because it will be the cornerstone of your brand personality.

 

7. Ask to Showcase Customer Reviews and Testimonials

More reviews mean there are more chances of acquiring conversions in the future. And for people on the hunt for niche beauty products, customer reviews and testimonials will help them get a clear indication of your products’ popularity.

Always ask a buyer to leave a review for your brand and ensure a bright future for your cosmetic brand.

 

8. Make Use of Reporting & Analytics Tools

An online business will require a number of advertising and marketing campaigns that need to be tracked on a regular basis to be optimized. To build a loyal customer base selling beauty products online, you have to ensure better performance by keeping a track of metrics like traffic, conversions, retention, etc.

Using Google Analytics can ensure better control over these campaigns with tools with enough information to improve performance.

A good website developer can help you acquire your performance metric goals by installing tracking codes on your website HTML code.

 

9. Take your Customer Service to The Next Level by harnessing the benefits of a CRM software

Imagine having to reach out to a company and your phone call is rerouted to several different reps, none of whom could resolve your issue? It’s very frustrating and makes you never want to engage with the brand again.

To make sure your customers are loyal, always ensure they have a pleasant experience with your brand. 

Kapture, a holistic CRM structure, enables you to provide every visitor the experience according to their preference and helps you achieve your goals at each stage in their journey.

Product recommendations, Self Serve, Powerful & Intelligent Chatbot, and Water Tight Integrations will empower your agents to work cohesively to build a complete picture of each visitor across their journey.

So why is customer retention important?

It is usually said that the cost of customer retention is five times lower than attracting a new one. An existing customer base is always more responsive and has keen brand awareness, therefore are likely to be repeat buyers.

And are more likely to share their positive experiences with like-minded people, essentially becoming free advocates for your business. This definitely works because people trust the opinions of the ones close to them. This only happens when they feel a connection with a brand which encourages businesses to focus on and build customer loyalty.

Returning customers are friends to your business and they not only help you make revenue but drive profits as well. Loyalty is a definite way to put you ahead of your competition

 

Do it the Kapture Way

Kapture recognizes that each of these customers has a unique intention and is looking for different solutions. Using intelligent machine learning, our software can offer contextual solutions to all these customers automatically.

You can create a truly omnichannel experience for your community across the website, chat, and even on social media.

 

About the Author

Nimit Kumar
Vatsla Issar
A seasoned professional with experience in Inside Sales, Market & Customer Research, Business, Customer Insight. Skilled in building trust and relationships with customers and team members for business and operational excellence.
Follow Vatsla on Social Media

 

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